Being a compendium of what Glenn Ingersoll is thinking and reading and you know whatever.

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Info Desk Blogging

We've got a sunny day, but the air is chill. Feels like it's thinking about snow.

Here I am again. Second time this week. Subbing this time for someone else. It's been steady, not hectic.

If you're ever in the Berkeley Public Library there are no restrooms on the first floor. Don't ask me why. We have restrooms on the 2nd, 3rd, and 5th floors. There are restrooms on the 4th floor, too, you know, but we don't tell the adults that because those 'strooms are kidling only.

The electronic resources training today was about newspapers, newspapers online. Not the newspaper's website. No, these are articles from newspapers. Here's one from the Oakland Tribune. If you don't have a Berkeley library card you may not be able to follow that link. So I'll tell you what it is. It's an article about drinking in Russia. "Perhaps as many as 30 percent of all Russian deaths are caused, in one way or another, by an addiction to the bottle." Sounds bad, right? "It's become a vicious cycle: When it gets unbearably cold (and that's saying something in such chilly environs as Moscow and St. Petersburg), some turn to drink in an attempt to ward off the pain. Too much firewater causes some inebriates to pass out in the snow. They then freeze to death. It's not pretty. Makes you ever-thankful for our relatively mild winters here in the Bay Area." Thankful for the lack of drunkcicles? The not-frozen-solid kind are easier to scrape off the sidewalk?